So I've only just downloaded and opened Homecrafter Plus for the first time. I've never dabbled in recolouring walls/floors before, but this program is already confusing me quite a bit. I see no options to import your own image, or extract pre-existing ones, so I have no idea how to even begin.

I must be missing something really simple here. Could someone please humour me and explain the process?

I'll show you what I do. It's more or less the same for walls, floors, and ground covers.

Starting at the very beginning...

Click the "Create Wall Coverings" and it'll take you to that tab.

From here, select the wallpaper type (#1). I've chosen Paneling. Then choose the wallpaper in that group you want to use as base (#2); I just stuck with the first one. Then I click the "Clone Selected Content" button (#3).


You should now see a preview of the cloned wall on three wall segments. Let's call this the "Preview Mode."

The texture can be found in your Projects folder inside your EA Games folder. For me, EA Games\The Sims™ 2 Ultimate Collection\Projects\HomeCrafter Plus\Working Directory. For this wall, it's wall-panel-unfinishedhalf2.bmp. Open this file and edit to your heart's content.

Back in our "Preview Mode" inside Homecrafter, the left side is for the appearance; the right side is more for the catalog info.

Left side:
You can click and drag the wall to rotate and view it from different angles in 3D space (this doesn't rotate the texture), or you can use the blue arrow buttons underneath the text box with the texture's file path. The plus and minus buttons zoom in/out accordingly. The buttons to the left refresh the wall appearance and reset the wall rotation back to a straight-forward view. As you make changes to the texture and save the .bmp file, you will want to click this "refresh" button so that Homecrafter is showing you the latest version of your wall. There is also "Grid on/off" which toggles the display of black lines separating each wall segment. This is helpful to see how the wall tiles across walls segments.

Right side:
Here you can change the name, description, and price of the wall. You can also change where the wall shows up in the catalog sort, such as tiles or paint.

When you are done, click that big icon with the arrow pointing into a folder (next to the "X" button) under the Subsort buttons.This will import your new wall into the game.

It's a good way to this. The roof, terrain, and wall are well hidden somewhere in the Program files (in fact, it's in the package named "catpatterns.bundle" in the folder "TSdata/Res/Catalog").

Thanks for that detailed response MSD. I can find the extracted images now.

One small question, is there a template anywhere with the grid lines as shown in Homecrafter to refer to when using your graphics program?

The grid lines just indicate the edges of the wall segment. The texture exported is a single wall segment, so the grid lines would just be the edges of the texture.

Oh yes I see what you mean.

Hm, guides say to keep the image as a bmp but importing one into Homecrafter comes out in different colours? Purple becomes blue for example. I read about the image having to be 32 bit max, which it is set to.

EDIT, changed to 24 bit and now displays correctly.